Having gone through the release processs recently, and seeing all the good improvements ant has been making to make it easier to release in future, here are some notes on where the pain points were for me, as input to any further improvements we may like to make.
most of the pain was just the lenth of time it takes to issue the long stream of commands, nurse them through their execution, verify their correct working and iterate over subparts of the process as indicated by the success or otherwise of any given step. With so many steps it's also easy to make a slip With reference to [1] here are some specific issues svn:merge is unworkable due to mergeproperties all over the source hierarchy (not sure if this has now been addresed?) there's a bug in signing maven artifacts which means some ended up in the apache repo with bad signatures. There's a suggested fix I think at [2] dependency artifact version checking setting the branch version to <newrelease>-SNAPSHOT is good for trapping issues, but bad for merging fixes from branch to trunk (can't just let it a merge run, must police these changes) upload speed: I wanted to do some things locally, and some things I wanted to use a remote machine for faster artifact upload. If I recall correctly the main things I wanted to do locally was artifact signing, both distros and maven artifacts. Aside from not really wanting my code signing private key on a remote machine, there were issues importing a private key. It seemed to be bad form to do this, so much so that the arguments on gpg to allow it seem to have been withdrawn. Checking the RAT reports -- now fixed I think. There's probably a knack to doing this quickly, but I found it a bit of a chore. Understanding which directories to do maven deploy from using the maven staging plugin to copy artifacts (no pain, I just didnt do it this way as the other way was tried and tested) [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TUSCANYxDOCx2x/Making+Releases [2] http://people.apache.org/~henkp/repo/faq.html (Comment from Clement Escoffier)
